Currently, a security-conscious user of a local area, wide area, or Internet network should have a password to turn on the user's personal computer, a password for each email account, a password for each type of network which is accessible, and numerous other passwords for individual files. If there are telephone access charges associated with accessing the network, different telephone numbers for credit card accounts and different passwords would be required for each credit card account. All the numbers and/or passwords must work together to allow access to the network for the user to send or receive information.
On the other end, the telecommunications carriers, web-content companies, and Internet service providers (ISPs) need to securely identify the user as the authorized user. Thus, passwords or personal identification numbers (PINs), collectively called personal identifiers, are almost universally used. The difficulty is that systems based on such personal identifiers are not very secure. Users who have large numbers of such personal identifiers often write them down in places where they can be found by others. Other users pick easily guessable words or number combinations which can be determined by unauthorized users, or hackers.
With the proliferation of various types of accounts, such as bank, telephone, credit, etc., and the places where the account information could be used, such as bank accounts for transfers, different telephone billing accounts, Internet stores, etc., the number of different personal identifiers required by a user has also proliferated to a tremendous extent. Because of the basic memory limitations of most users, it has also become increasingly difficult to maintain security of such personal identifiers.